The invention relates to creating multi-frame web pages.
Historically, a computer user's ability to author an interactive intranet or internet site ("web site") has depended upon the user's proficiency with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the language most-commonly used to define the structure and content of web pages. Creating a web page historically requires manual entry of HTML code and plain text to define the structure and content of the page and to establish hyperlinks to other computer resources. As a result, the author of a web page generally must have a relatively deep understanding of HTML.
Creation of multi-frame pages, i.e., pages divided into multiple sub-pages that display the contents of multiple intranet or internet resources, requires an even more developed understanding of HTML. Multi-frame web pages commonly are used to display, at the same time, an HTML page and the contents of another web resource, such as an HTML page, an image, or a graphics file, accessible through a hyperlink in the HTML page. Creating this type of multi-frame page requires manual entry not only of HTML code and plain text defining the HTML page, but also HTML code defining the number and layout of the multiple frames and instructing the computer to display the contents of the hyperlinked resource in a frame other than the frame displaying the HTML file.
Recent introduction of graphics-based page authoring tools has begun to simplify the creation of web sites. For example, Adobe.RTM. PageMill.TM. version 1.0 allowed a user to design a web page by manipulating graphical images representing the page. PageMill.TM. 1.0 then converted the graphical images into HTML code embodying the page.